The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an independent intergovernmental body established to strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human well-being and sustainable development.
In decision IPBES-10/1, the Plenary approved a methodological assessment on monitoring biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. Following a call for expressions of interest, McGill University made an offer to host the technical support unit for the assessment, which was accepted by the Bureau on 22 November 2023.
The assessment aims to support national and global efforts to:
(a) monitor biodiversity, nature’s contributions to people and the drives of observed changes; and
(b) monitor progress towards the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), in support of implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity and its three objectives, while contributing to monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals and other relevant multilateral environmental agreements. The assessment will evaluate existing data and systems, as well as those needed to calculate the indicators of the GBF monitoring framework, prioritizing headline indicators and assessing data availability for others. It will examine existing capacities and resources for data collection and analysis at national and global scales, identifying gaps in data availability and access, including biases in taxonomic, geographic, and temporal coverage across marine, inland water, and terrestrial ecosystems. Challenges and barriers related to data generation, access, sharing, and the application of robust statistical methods for trend detection and attribution will also be assessed.
Finally, the assessment will highlight opportunities to strengthen monitoring capacities particularly in developing countries. It will also assess opportunities to advance community-based, Indigenous, and citizen-science monitoring, and will consider options to enhance cooperation, promote resource-sharing and reporting, and facilitate the integration of data from multiple sources, with the goal of improving understanding of biodiversity change, especially in underrepresented regions.
For more information, contact us

• Cassia Foley (Technical Support Unit) - cassia.foley@mcgill.ca
• Andrew Gonzalez (Co-chair) - andrew.gonzlez@mcgill.ca
• General technical support unit - monitoring-assessment@ipbes-tsu.org

Click here for more info.

BON in a Box is an initiative of GEO BON that provides users, contributors, organizations and countries with a customizable, modular toolkit to design, implement, and strengthen biodiversity observation networks (BONs). The project supports evidence-based decision-making by helping stakeholders identify biodiversity monitoring priorities, select appropriate Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), and integrate biodiversity data into policy-relevant indicators, such as for the monitoring framework of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. In collaboration with QCBS members, BON in a Box facilitates capacity building, promotes data interoperability, and fosters partnerships among experts and across sectors. This ensures that biodiversity observations are standardized, interoperable, comparable across scales, and directly useful for conservation planning, policy implementation, and the assessment of global biodiversity targets (e.g., Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, SDGs, IPBES). The partnership with QCBS will strengthen methodological development, align monitoring approaches with provincial, federal, and global needs, and engage students, researchers, and stakeholders in co-developing innovative tools for biodiversity science and policy.
For more information, contact us :

• Jean-Michel Lord - jean-michel.lord@mcgill.ca
• Jory Griffith - boninabox@geobon.org

Click here for more info.

Biodiversité Québec is a scientific partnership whose work focuses on communicating information on the state of biodiversity and its changes. It aims to become a key agent for observing changes occurring in ecosystems, in addition to disseminating popularized information. Its mission is to collect observation data, improve biodiversity monitoring in Quebec, and make syntheses and analyses accessible to the public. The initiative also aims to raise awareness among Quebecers about biodiversity issues, in addition to supporting decision-makers and land managers in taking biodiversity data into account. The Government of Quebec and university researchers bring together numerous partners within a single network. Biodiversité Québec relies on a collective effort to acquire knowledge in the field, enhance data value, and use new technologies. The pooling of collected data allows for new scientific advances to anticipate the effects of climate and human activities on ecosystems.
For more information, contact us :

• Marie-Pierre Varin - marie-pierre.varin@usherbrooke.ca
• Dominique Gravel - dominique.gravel@usherbrooke.ca

Click here for more info.

This transdisciplinary research project aims to strengthen the understanding and integration of the links between the circular economy (CE) and biodiversity, in order to support public and sectoral decision-making in line with the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and Quebec's Nature 2030 Plan. The objective is to develop a conceptual and operational framework, indicators and concrete tools to assess the impact of circularity strategies on biodiversity, and vice versa. The project is led by a group of recognized academic and community partners, who bring together expertise in circular economy, biodiversity science and conservation:
Quebec Circular Economy Research Network (RRECQ): A unique network in Canada, mobilizing more than 230 researchers to strengthen the capacity to deploy circularity strategies across industrial sectors and territories, with a view to a sustainable transition.
Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science (QCBS): A recognized inter-institutional network that helps position Quebec as a leader in biodiversity science. It mobilizes a broad community of researchers around ecosystem monitoring, biodiversity change forecasting and decision-making support, drawing on a diversity of approaches ranging from observation technologies to social sciences.
Société pour la nature et les parcs (SNAP Québec): Non-profit organization dedicated to nature protection. Recognized for its collaborative approach with governments, First Nations, Inuit, industry stakeholders and local communities.
Biodiversité Québec: Initiative supported by the government and the scientific community. Aims to collect and promote biodiversity observation data, and to produce accessible syntheses and tools for decision-makers and land managers. By combining these expertises, the project aims to develop integrated and territorialized approaches, based on workshops, literature reviews and concrete case studies, in order to equip decision-makers and accelerate ecological transitions that bring benefits to nature and society.
For more information, contact us :

• Rim Khlifa - rim.khlifa@mcgill.ca
• Andrew Gonzalez - andrew.gonzalez@mcgill.ca
• Fanie Pelletier - fanie.pelletier@USherbrooke.ca
• Najet Guefradj - najet.guefradj@mcgill.ca

Click here for more info.

Québec is vast and undersampled, with over 90% of the land area without any occurrence records of any taxa. These gaps would be incredibly expensive and time-consuming to fill with traditional scientific and management surveys. Citizen science offers the only viable pathway to filling these gaps quickly. However, citizen science is biased toward certain taxa and places, leaving major gaps that require coordination to fill. The QCBS is well-positioned to help fill this gap, because it is a network of universities and researchers who live, work, and study in many places in Québec. The “Blitz the Gap” (www.blitzthegap.org) project aims to leverage the QCBS’s broad network to fill biodiversity data gaps. The main funding component are Champion Grants, which are offered to QCBS graduate student and postdoc members to plan a bioblitz with a local community, a park, a library or school, or to support sampling events for themselves and their lab group. These grants offer leadership and development opportunities for QCBS members to spearhead their own initiatives to close the data gaps that limit our capacity to monitor biodiversity in Québec, and to build closer ties between the QCBS and local communities. We partnered with James Pagé from iNaturalist Canada to advise us on the project. All observations are collected in the Blitz the Gap project on iNaturalist.ca (with a specific project for QCBS members: inaturalist.ca/projects/blitz-the-gap-qcbs-champions), and will be included in Biodiversité Québec’s Atlas database to monitor biodiversity changes in Québec. The next iteration will include automated “challenges” (i.e., priority maps and species lists). We are particularly excited about making an openly accessible Bon-in-a-Box project that will let scientists and conservationists toggle scenarios to build a custom sampling scheme for their purpose (e.g., improving range coverage for data-deficient species) and will allow transparent access to the full pipeline.
For more information, contact us :

• Laura Pollock - laura.pollock@mcgill.ca
• Katherine Hébert - katherine.hebert@mcgill.ca

Click here for more info.

Biodiversity science progressed in the last fifteen years due to remarkable technical advances in computing power and data acquisition, resulting in large biodiversity databases. Increasing societal demands for assessment of the status of biodiversity under global changes is pushing ecology and environmental sciences towards a predictive science. Biodiversity monitoring programs implemented to track the impacts of major industrial projects (e.g. hydro-electricity dams, mines) generate massive amounts of information that can be used to predict future impacts of human actions on biodiversity. Other fields of life sciences, such as genomics and medicine, have met increasing data availability by developing computational infrastructure, data pipelines and analytic frameworks, while ecology is comparatively lagging behind. The Computational Biodiversity Science and Services training program (BIOS2) was developed to address this need. BIOS2 is a community of early career researchers who are exploring and applying modern-day computational and quantitative techniques to address the challenges of biodiversity sciences. Through technical and cross-curricular training, working groups, internships, and collaborative and networking activities, the program aims to broaden the opportunities and skills of students and postdoctoral fellows, and prepare them for high-impact careers in biodiversity science. More info: https://bios2.usherbrooke.ca, info.bio2@usherbrooke.ca Click here for more info.

In working landscapes, the focus has been on the cheap, reliable, and efficient production of individual ecosystem services such as food, energy, or timber, ignoring most effects on other services or other places. We make decisions this way even though have good evidence that there are interactions between resource sectors, across locations, and among ecosystem services. Which means we are making critically important decisions about the future of an isolated, piecemeal fashion with a limited picture of the ecological, economic, and social risks associated with those decisions. ResNet (2019 – 2024) is designed to provide the cross-sectoral, cross-landscape knowledge and information needed to manage working landscapes for the provision of multiple ecosystem services for multiple beneficiaries, now and into the future. To do this, Resnet focuses its work on three key themes in which research is lacking across six landscapes in Canada. In each of the six landscapes, ResNet has launched a series of co- designed investigations into the provision, modeling, and governance of multiple ecosystem services, with academics working alongside industry, government, NGO, and Indigenous partners and other stakeholders. ResNet is an interdisciplinary group (100+ researchers, 11 universities, 17 partner organizations) of researchers with expertise in ecology, economics, natural resource management, social-ecological governance, system resilience, statistics, and modelling. Ultimately, ResNet will develop new tools for estimating ecosystem services outcomes of land use and management decisions for multiple ecosystem services in Canada’s working landscapes. These tools can improve stewardship of Canada’s working landscapes and all the ecosystem services they provide, while fundamentally advancing scientific knowledge about ecosystem services. Click here for more info.

The report on ecological connectivity science in the Region of Resolution 40-3 reviews the science of connectivity and the ensemble of plans and projects focused on evaluating and protecting the ecological connectivity of the Northeast Region of North America. These projects are now inventoried on the Ecological Connectivity web portal (https://ecologicalconnectivity.com). Objectives and geographic scope of these projects are compared, while contrasting the scientific methods and measures used to define the networks of habitat and corridors they identify. These methods are compared to current approaches in the connectivity science literature and opportunities are identified for integrating information and conservation goals across plans. To aid interpretation, a brief review of key concepts in connectivity research is provided. Through comparison of the methodologies, scales, and coverage of these projects, the authors of this report identify current gaps in analyses but also the opportunities for harnessing connectivity science for conservation in the Region. Click here for more info.

For decades, southern Quebec has been subject to significant and sustained development pressures, and faces strong trade-offs for the use of the land and resources it contains on an extractive type of economic model that is not changing much. However, Quebec's biodiversity is mainly concentrated in this part of the province, which is more diversified than the areas further north. These pressures affect biodiversity and induce profound changes in the functions and services provided by the ecosystems on which many economic sectors, and more globally, our well-being depend. This situation is all the more worrying since biodiversity is generally recognized as the basis of any adaptation strategy to climate change. In order for Quebec society to cope with environmental changes, whether local or global, it is necessary to develop a different relationship with our natural heritage, especially south of the 49th parallel in Quebec. The growing social demand for environmental protection reflects the importance of these issues for many stakeholders, and there is a broad consensus on the actions that should be taken. Quebec must adopt an ambitious plan to initiate and oversee the changes that are needed in the way we occupy and manage the land and the resources it resources. With this in mind, the Quebec Biodiversity Science Centre (QCBS), the Canada Research Chair in Ecological Economics at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, the Liber Ero Chair in Conservation Biology at McGill University, the Regroupement national des conseils régionaux de l'environnement du Québec and the Réseau de milieux naturels protégés (RMN) have initiated the project of a White Paper for Southern Quebec. The objective of this process is to propose a consensual vision and to bring out major orientations under which concrete measures can be grouped to maintain biodiversity south of the 49th parallel. Click here for more info.